A friend posted Simon Doonan’s article, “Why The Art World is So Loathsome,” on my Facebook wall this weekend. I normally love Simon Doonan, and I think he’s very funny. I think he is an adept social commentator. But I also think it’s important to point out that people shouldn’t take his opinions about the art world too seriously. The art world he knows is the one very much entrenched with the fashion world, and by extension, the glossy media, and that is not an art world that anyone who writes or thinks about contemporary art critically more than cursorily considers.
The fact that he says that Art Basel Miami “has become a promo-party cheese-fest” must mean that at one time, he took thought it was a non-promo-party, non-cheese-fest, which immediately disqualifies him. Art Basel Miami has always been, and will always be, a clusterfuck of bad taste. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, depending on what you’re into.
I am overflowing with strong opinions right now, but I don’t want to get in trouble for writing something inflammatory, so I’m going to keep my mouth shut. Except to say the following.
Doonan laid out 8 reasons why the art world is so loathsome, many of them based on Camilla Paglia’s new book, “Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars.” I haven’t read the book, but the title leads me to believe that Paglia discounts art made after the 1970s by virtue of the fact that her timeline ends there. It’s just such a laughably cantankerous thing to do—declare something to be dead or decaying when the definition of what it is is constantly changing (the novel, for instance, or painting). It’s silly, a symptom of intellectual mediocrity or aging.
The most ridiculous point, culled in part from Paglia’s text, that Doonan makes is that we are living in the time of a “Post-Skill Movement.” He says:
For years I happily free-associated with my papier-mâché, my props, and my found objects … and then something weird happened. Artists put down their brushes and stole my objets trouves, my staple guns and glue guns. I first noticed the trend at the 1997 Sensation show at the Royal Academy in London. Enter the Post-Skill Movement.
With its Damien Hirst vitrines, Tracey Emin camping vignettes, and Sarah Lucas found-object tableaux, this landmark show was like one giant Barneys window. This realization brought me no satisfaction: “If art is morphing into display, then what the hell are we window dressers supposed to plonk into our constantly changing vignettes?” I asked myself as I gazed at Jake and Dinos Chapman’s defiled window mannequins. I felt like a professional hooker who is no longer sure what to wear because all the regular respectable ladies are now dressing like sluts. (Which, by the way, they are.)
I mean, seriously, has Simon Doonan never heard of Marcel Duchamp?
Ultimately, the point I’m trying to make (and poorly) is that good art is being made by very skilled artists, but the more you buy into the idea that it’s not, the less you’ll sniff it out. So I’m telling you, reader, don’t stop searching for it, because it will never stop existing.
One place you might want to look is recently re-opened Drawing Center, which is currently staging an exhibition, “The Yearbooks,” by the Colombian artist José Antonio Suárez Londoño. Consisting of pages from Londoño’s personal notebooks, which contain daily drawings he makes based on his readings, the drawings are proof that skilled artists still have a place in museums. Londoño’s hand is just as adept as Leonardo da Vinci’s. In fact, his notebooks remind me of the Codexes. Check the exhibition out before it closes on December 16.
(And I apologize to both The Drawing Center and Londoño for the very poor photograph I posted above, of one of the drawings in the catalog.)
